Steps one through three: prune, consolidate, rewrite
Step one is the prune. Audit every leaf by impressions and by cosine similarity to its peers; any leaf below twenty impressions in ninety days and above 0.72 cosine to a peer gets removed. We have pruned thirty to fifty percent of a surface on the worst-case audit. Step two is consolidation: remaining leaves with a peer above 0.72 get merged into a single longer leaf with a 301 from the merged URLs. Step three is rewrite: every remaining leaf gets a fresh editorial pass focused on adding two specific numerics or examples. The total work on a hundred-leaf surface is three to five engineering-days plus an editorial week.
Steps four through six: re-submit, monitor, defend
Step four is re-submission: refresh the sitemap with new lastModified timestamps, ping IndexNow, request re-indexing for a sample of consolidated leaves in Search Console. Step five is monitoring: watch the impressions curve in Search Console daily for the first thirty days; look for the inflection where pruned-leaf impressions stop dropping and consolidated-leaf impressions start rising. Step six is defense: do not add new leaves during recovery. New growth during a recovery confuses the signal and can re-trigger the classifier; wait until impressions stabilize on the trimmed set.
Signals that the recovery is working
Three signals matter. One, the impressions curve flattens within three weeks of step four; a continued decline at week three means the prune was not deep enough and you repeat steps one and two. Two, the average position improves for the consolidated leaves; a typical recovery sees average position move from twenty-five to fifteen over thirty days. Three, the click-through-rate per leaf-impression rises, indicating the surviving leaves match search intent better than the pruned set. On the audited surfaces we ran this playbook on, full recovery to pre-penalty impressions took ninety-three and one hundred twenty-eight days respectively.